自強之路

Richard Posner
Chicago School of Economics
Born: January 11, 1939 (age 72) New York City, New York, U.S.
Alma mater: Yale University and Harvard University
Richard Allen Posner (born January 11, 1939) is an American jurist, legal theorist, and economist who is currently a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He is an influential figure in the law and economics school of thought. 
Posner has been called "the world’s most distinguished legal scholar." He is the author of nearly 40 books on jurisprudence, economics, and several other topics, including Economic Analysis of Law, The Economics of Justice, The Problems of Jurisprudence, Sex and Reason, Law, Pragmatism and Democracy, and The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy. The Journal of Legal Studies has identified Posner as the most cited legal scholar of the 20th century.
Early life and education 
Born in New York City, Posner graduated from Yale College (A.B., 1959, summa cum laude), majoring in English, and from Harvard Law School (LL.B., 1962, magna cum laude), where he was first in his class[3] and president of the Harvard Law Review. After clerking for Justice William J. Brennan of the United States Supreme Court during the 1962-63 term, he served as Attorney-Advisor to Federal Trade Commissioner Philip Elman; he would later argue that the Federal Trade Commission ought to be abolished. He went on to work in the Office of the Solicitor General in the U.S. Department of Justice, under Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall.
Legal career 
In 1968, Posner accepted a position teaching at Stanford Law School. In 1969, Posner moved to the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School, where he remains a Senior Lecturer and where his son Eric Posner is a Professor. He was a founding editor of the Journal of Legal Studies in 1972. 
On October 27, 1981, Posner was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit vacated by Philip Willis Tone. Posner was confirmed by the United States Senate on November 24, 1981, and received his commission on December 1, 1981. He served as Chief Judge of that court from 1993 to 2000, while remaining a part-time professor at the University of Chicago. 
Posner is a pragmatist in philosophy, a classical liberal in politics, and an economist in legal methodology. He is a prolific author of articles and books on a wide range of topics including law and economics, law and literature, the federal judiciary, moral theory, intellectual property, antitrust law, public intellectuals, and legal history. He is also well known for writing on a wide variety of current events including the 2000 presidential election recount controversy, President Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky and his resulting impeachment procedure, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. His analysis of the Lewinsky scandal cut across most party and ideological divisions. Posner's greatest influence is through his writings on law and economics—The New York Times called him "one of the most important antitrust scholars of the past half-century." In December 2004, Posner started a joint blog with Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker. He also has a blog at The Atlantic, where he discusses the financial crisis. 
Posner was mentioned in 2005 as a potential nominee to replace Sandra Day O'Connor because of his prominence as a scholar and an appellate judge. Robert S. Boynton has written in The Washington Post that he believes Posner will never sit on the Supreme Court because, despite his "obvious brilliance," his occasionally "outrageous conclusions," such as his contention "that the rule of law is an accidental and dispensable element of legal ideology"; his argument that buying and selling children on the free market would lead to better outcomes than the present situation, government-regulated adoption; and his support for the legalization of marijuana and LSD.
Legal positions
In Posner's youth and in the 1960s as law clerk to William J. Brennan he was generally counted as a liberal. However, in reaction to some of the perceived excesses of the late 1960s, Posner developed a strongly conservative bent. He encountered Chicago School economists Aaron Director and George Stigler while a professor at Stanford. Posner summarized his views on law and economics in his 1973 book The Economic Analysis of Law. 
Today, although generally considered a figure of the right, Posner's pragmatism, his qualified moral relativism and moral skepticism, and his affection for the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche set him apart from most American conservatives. Among his other influences are the American jurists Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Learned Hand.

Posner and Guitar Lesson
Controversial, but unquestionably high art created by one of the twentieth century’s greatest painters.  It is even used by Richard Posner in his magisterial 1992 book Sex and Reason (pp. 376-7) as an example of how it can be nigh impossible to draw a clean distinction between “art” and “pornography.” 
Judge Posner helpfully notes also that the girl in the painting whose guitar lesson has turned into a very different kind of lesson is in the same position as Christ in Enguerrand Quarton‘s fifteenth century La Pietà de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon.

(adapted from Wiki)